Power Laws and the Linkocracy

I believe it was Bill at IndustrialBlog who once referred to the blogosphere as "the ultimate meritocracy." I disagree with this assessment. Blogs become popular and well-trafficked for a number of reasons, not always simply merit, but tend to stay popular and well-trafficked because they are popular and well-trafficked. I have seen blogs with very little merit receive enormous amounts of traffic and vast numbers of comments from bloggers hoping to increase their own site traffic by comment clickthroughs.* I have seen well-written and thoughtful blogs toil away in obscurity, unread by anyone except the writer and perhaps a few accidental surfers.

Thanks to Mr. H.K.'s websurfing, I clicked through to an article in New York Magazine called "Blogs to Riches: The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom". It focuses primarily on the few bloggers (and non-bloggers) who have managed to turn a tidy profit from their blogs, but it does have a fascinating discussion of power laws and their application to blog popularity that fleshes out the concept of the linkocracy. While you're there check out the "Related Stories", including "Linkology: How the Most-Linked-To Blogs Relate". Then ask yourself: Who's linking to me?

*I could give an example but won't. But here's a hint: it's a site that was mentioned in a comment a few weeks ago, a site that is often spoken of in hushed terms. The posts on the site were fairly unimpressive, but each one had hundreds of comments.